"How the Blog Broke the Web"

"In ‘94, a college student named Justin Hall broke free from the table of contents format. He added to the top of his homepage daily, and he headlined each section with the date. He shared everything: from interesting links he found to his experiments with sex and drugs.

Justin’s Links became the first daily web diary.

That’s what they were called then… web diaries. (The name weblogcame a few years later, as some of their writers moved away from extremely personal topics.)...

When jjg compiled his list of “web logs” in early 1999, there were only 23. That’s not a typo: Twenty-three, twenty-three web logs on the internet, ah ah ah. No doubt he missed many — and a bunch had lived and died by then, including mine — but by what kind of multiplier? Five? Ten times? So there were what, maybe 230 web logs?...

Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)

Chronological content was in the minority."

https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/

I fully miss homepages. 

I miss the old weird internet where you went to a site because your friend told you about it and spelled it for you, and you looked through every section and peeked into someone's mind that way. Found weird quizzes and puzzles and flash games and stories. 

but when I really think about it, I don't actually want to go back. I think I just wish that that internet still existed for someone, for some 12-year-old waiting to be picked up from school, exploring secret silly worlds in the library with their friends

FB: "the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before.

There are no more quirky homepages."

"Our Attitude Toward Aliens Proves We Still Think We’re Special"

"The strong Fermi’s paradox became even stronger, so to speak, in 2001, with the work of Charles Lineweaver and collaborators on the age distribution of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way. His calculations show that Earth-like planets in our galaxy began forming more than 9 billion years ago, and that their median age is 6.4 ± 0.9 billion years, which is significantly greater than the age of the Earth and the solar system. This means that a large majority of habitable planets are much older than Earth. If we believe that humans and the planet we live on are not particularly special compared to other civilizations on other planets, we would conclude that the stage of the biosphere and technology on other occupied planets must be, on average, older than the corresponding stages we see on Earth. If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system, and we are not much faster than other civilizations, those civilizations should have completed this colonization long ago and spread to other parts of the galaxy... 

Many of us choose to ignore Fermi’s paradox, or even fight it, because it requires too complete an acceptance of our cosmic mediocrity. We would rather secretly believe we are special than confront the real consequences of the paradox—consequences like, for example, intelligence being a maladaptive trait, or our universe being a simulation, or us living in a cosmic zoo. "

http://m.nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-were-special

Related: Other one on imagining aliens

FB: "Now that we know that the Earth is a latecomer, and believe the foundations of life have the power to take hold quickly, Fermi’s paradox is more puzzling than ever. In the evocative words of physicist Adrian Kent: It’s just too damn quiet in the local universe."

"The classist vilification of the Black Friday shopper"

"This was in a Walmart with a majority black staff and clientele, and it was kind of covered in a way that the LA riots were. There were helicopter shots of throngs of black bodies; there was a lot of the same kind of discourse, the fear of a black underclass coming for Beverly Hills, coming for your stuff in your gated communities.

There were similarities in the way the coverage was racialized, footage of people ransacking goods while there’s a whole host of social problems and they’re living in a veritable police state. It looked identical if you turned the sound off; it was very striking.

So from there, I started to look at the history of the crowd and the discourse around crowds. Really from the rise of historical modernity, crowds have been associated with danger, disease, race. Today, for example, we see how Trump has mobilized mobs...

After the 9/11 attacks, [George W.] Bush told people to go out and shop, that it’s your civic duty. So blaming Black Friday shoppers for shopping sends a contradictory message. I think it’s also class shaming."

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/20/18103890/black-friday-shopping-coverage-classism-racism

It's true - there is a kind of voyeurism, a kind of sick superior glee in watching the images of hordes of people swarming big box stores, images of chaos and destruction in their wake, delivered to you on your full-price television in your warm, comfortable home while you eat copious leftovers. 

It's the new Thanksgiving Day Parade - bring your children to gawk and laugh at the undignified shopping experiences of poorer people. 

FB: "in very financially troubled times, Black Friday might be people’s only chance to have access to certain things, to buy what they need.

Also, the public is consistently told that in order to participate in our culture, they should be engaging in consumerism. It makes us feel this sense of connection, a sense of belonging to something."

"APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys" 

"something is amiss for men as well. Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s... 

just as this old psychology left out women and people of color and conformed to gender-role stereotypes, it also failed to take men’s gendered experiences into account. Once psychologists began studying the experiences of women through a gender lens, it became increasingly clear that the study of men needed the same gender-aware approach, says Levant.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors"

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/ce-corner.aspx?fbclid=IwAR1sXHtCpQbkxfIfkurzXAGdwubZbYFBiNmMMLYAuNDTMryzxcHj9OpyI2o

Related: myth of individualism, harm of striving, lone gunman

FB: "Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly." 

"How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation"

"the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives... 

Financially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, far more student debt. The “greatest generation” had the Depression and the GI Bill; boomers had the golden age of capitalism; Gen-X had deregulation and trickle-down economics. And millennials? We’ve got venture capital, but we’ve also got the 2008 financial crisis, the decline of the middle class and the rise of the 1%, and the steady decay of unions and stable, full-time employment... 

students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes... 

When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t... 

Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”"

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharefacebook&utm_term=.kaJrp9ea6&ref=mobile_share&fbclid=IwAR19se6rUpqcz-6s5CWliOm7pxcaMB5yfGG6ke_D00mQTqJtpRPqJQSUL5w

FB: this is how I should introduce myself "I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset."

"Inside the Radical, Uncomfortable Movement to Reform White Supremacists"

"The deradicalization movement combines insights gleaned from social work, 12-step programs, psychology, neurochemistry, and the personal experiences of “formers” who have left extremist groups. It’s tricky work. Few extremists make clean breaks with their past. Many liken hate to an addiction—hard to quit and easy to relapse into. The process is slow and one-on-one; it doesn’t promise to defeat hate groups so much as chip away at a movement that includes more than 400 organizations with thousands of members, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center... 

Kruglanski found that psychological signposts were better predictors of radicalization. He called these factors “the three Ns”—need, narrative, and network. It doesn’t matter if they are skinheads or jihadis; everyone who gets involved in hate movements has a deep urge to participate in a greater cause. Yet that cause, Kruglanski argued, needn’t be destructive. To successfully deradicalize a neo-Nazi, a new, constructive set of Ns—which might stem from education, a job, a partner—would have to replace the old, hateful ones."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/reform-white-supremacists-shane-johnson-life-after-hate/

FB: "Many became hardcore racists only after they had joined white supremacist groups. Rather than preexisting anti-Semitism or xenophobia, a cocktail of experiences such as isolation, depression, anxiety, or childhood abuse typically served as the stepping stones to extremism. This suggested that the behavioral and social rewards of participating in hate groups are perhaps more fundamental to understanding—and stopping—extremist behavior than the ideology behind it."

"What Rep. Steve King Gets Wrong About The Dark Ages -- And Western Civilization"

"His comments also raised a lot of questions and concerns among historians who have pointed out that the idea of "Western Civilization" is itself a fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. For more perspective on this, I reached out to T.J. Tallie, an African historian at Washington & Lee University. As many historians have recognized, the concept of "Western Civilization" is itself rather new. It grew from debates of East versus West in late 19th century European intellectual circles, but did not gain traction in the U.S. until it was time to explain to soldiers going into World War I why they should fight for the survival of Europe...

After World War I and then World War II, there was growing interest in the narrative of our connection to western Europe. As University of North Carolina historian Lloyd Kramer said in an earlier interview on thisdevelopment, this narrative was part of the "modernization theory of history, popular in the late 1940s and ’50s, which described the world, as we came out of the horrors of World War I and World War II, as moving toward secular modernization.""

https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2016/07/23/stevekingandthedarkages/#35e438155980